Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks during a town hall held at the Laney College soccer field in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, May 31, 2019. Thousands of supporters showed up to hear the senator from Massachusetts speak. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group)

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up the country’s biggest tech firms hasn’t stopped employees of those companies from bankrolling her campaign.

The Massachusetts senator came in second among the Democratic presidential candidates in donations from employees of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Google’s parent company Alphabet over the last three months, fundraising reports released Monday night showed. And she led the field in donations from people who listed their occupation as “software engineer” or “programmer” — a sign that her message of fighting corporate power is resonating among the tech industry’s rank-and-file.

Warren came in behind Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg in total donations from workers at the big four tech firms, raising about $102,000 to Buttigieg’s $124,000 between April and the end of June. She took in $211,000 from software engineers, just above Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $210,000, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis. Only donations from people who gave more than $200 were counted, as campaigns aren’t required to report smaller donations individually.

The numbers are an escalation of a similar trend from the first fundraising quarter of the year, when Warren came in third among employees of the big tech firms and second among software engineers and programmers.

Since then, Warren’s proposal to split the largest companies apart — in order to promote competition and reduce the tech giants’ power — has caught on in Democratic circles, with top candidates like Sanders endorsing the idea and plenty of others, including Buttigieg, saying they’d consider it. Supporters argue it would give tech startups more room to grow without being crushed or sucked up by the 800-pound gorillas of the industry.

“I don’t think it will magically take us back to the days of the tech boom when there were lots of startups having IPOs after a handful of years, but I think it would create some more variety in the job market,” Max Kaehn, a Google software engineer and Warren donor, said in an interview earlier this year.

But many tech executives strongly oppose the idea, arguing it would be a boon for massive tech companies in China, and some remain worried about Warren. Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and Trump supporter, called the senator the most “dangerous” Democratic candidate for president in an interview on Fox News Monday night. Google employees had donated to her campaign because they had “a little bit of a bad conscience,” he said.

Some of the senator’s tech-world donors include Chris Sacca, a venture capital investor who’s backed companies like Twitter and Uber, John Macfarlane, the founder of Sonos, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and venture capital investor.

Overall, Warren raised more than $19 million over the fundraising period, about two-thirds of which came from people who gave her less than $200. Her numbers were especially strong considering she’s vowed not to hold large-dollar fundraisers for her campaign, instead relying on online donors to send her a few dollars at a time.

Casey Tolan covers national politics and the Trump administration for the Bay Area News Group. Previously, he was a reporter for the news website Fusion, where he covered criminal justice, immigration, and politics. His reporting has also been published in CNN, Slate, the Village Voice, the Texas Observer, the Daily Beast and other news outlets. Casey grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and graduated from Columbia University.

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